Dev Chatter – Early April

The following conversations were taken from the Skype Dimensions chat, Rift Community Discord, and the April 13th live stream. Come join us on discord here: https://discord.gg/BQJnPQ6. As a reminder, Discord is more than just a pure voice service, it also serves as a text chat service similar to IRC and old style chat rooms, but far more modernized. This is primarily how it is used for Rift.

As usual, these have been anonymized, and edited for topic flow and some minor grammar tweaks. We got talk on a few topics, including some gear talk, a discussion on the recent PTS class changes, details from the twitch chat about iRotP, and full details on some upcoming changes to dimension boxes.

The purpose of these dev chatter posts is to summarize the general thoughts of Rift’s dev team.

All details are subject to change, and should not be taken as 100% guaranteed to happen.

Is there a hard mode iRotp?
I won’t rule it out. It is never safe to assume anything

What are the chances of gear drop in TD raid with the 2 free runs that you get?
25% [per boss].

[Will] Alsbeth Rainment will be in summer event again?
Yes, it will be back for Summerfest.

[Wasn’t there ] mention [about] trying to ditch hit, but [it] got shut down?
We were going to do something different but ultimately had to shelve it due to time constraints. [Hit] is hand entered into each item individually which is why we always have issues with it.

Another reason why [we were] pushing for to move away from it so we wouldn’t have recurring issues.

[is it intended that ] the eternal armor is better than ROTP Drops?
This is as intended.

Does ilvl take into account item rarity? or does ilvl determine the number of “points” that can be spent on stats for that item slot for its rarity?
Not to get too far into the mechanics… yes. The short answer is that item budget is a combination of total iLVL multiplied by slot mod where the base item level is set and then any rarity that is applied to the item after that increases the iLVL thus affecting budget.

[Could you] Switch [from hit requirements] to the inherent iLevel of gear and make the iLevel a public thing. “Must have XXXX iLevel to ride this ride” and make it a total gear thing.
We kinda sorta but don’t really have a “gear score”. Even then, [we’re] not completely sure that removing HIT and going to the gear score system buys us anything aside from a lot of work.

The next few responses are about the following tenative changes, set to arrive on PTS.

“Vulcanist – Molten Wave now correctly requires spending a legendary point to behave as legendary.” sooo you could just cast MW normally and it’d work as Legendary?
Yes. which probably explains the Prim parses that were well above other specs.

[I heard that] Predator had some death stuff in it? if yes, is it gonna have some interactions with zerker?
Predator is fire and death.

[I’m] greatly concerned with the potential loss to the only warrior soul I have decent DPS with left. (Referencing the PTS changes to Tempest)
The free cleave is too high, and was never intended to strike the primary target.Positioning does matter [for the cleave], but the other souls can’t compete with it right now it will still be a strong cleave option, but it shouldn’t just flat out trump reaver or champ in cases where there are bonus targets. It was just a tad overtuned anyway

Reaver from what I’ve seen is low DPS.
It needs 4 long lived targets, but its probably low.[We] can live with that for now. Warriors have other specs performing quite well.

Like which [specs are performing quite well]? Tempest and….Beastmaster?
Warriors can use paragon, tempest, and WL. All of which are performing in the target

Which one of those energy starve, since that’s required now?
WL has easy access to an energy dump. Legendary Breaking blow (which you can take kinda any melee spec), if you just want a periodic “put me low”

You can also not flurry in Para and it should starve if you’re playing it without 1 button

I’ll recopy tonight and parse for tempest to see how big of a switch I get. 5 min long enough?
Ideally you should run several 5m parses to reduce variance, but yes, 5m should be plenty

[What is] the purpose for this part? “No longer hits the primary target automatically. “
So skyfall as a legendary requires at least a second target to benefit. This is a fairly standard “adding aoe to non aoe thing” behavior. [This change was made] because of how much damage lightning rod procs are worth for a ranged spec that is incredibly mobile. This will also make legendary LT more valuable, but Skyfall damage on a single target will be like a 1/3rd what it was

[Our] recommendation for people worried this will make temp too difficult is swap from skyfall to LT legendary [for single target]

I have a friend or two using 1 button Tempest and be like “I’m loving my tempest dps hope they don’t nerf it” bad news for them I guess.
1 button tempest is part of the problem here. [We] can’t have one buttons that perform that well

[How many buttons are you aiming for then?]
[Our] long term goal is get spec core rotations to [no more than] 8 buttons. although thats a very long term goal [in addition to] reducing the [temp buff] whack-a-mole patch to patch. We have too many buttons in most specs right now.

I am curious if we’ll be able to get another more user friendly items than the pvp banner to teleport around
Yeah, a non-pvp port item is definitely on our todo list.

[Is the Fishing Rune being looked at? Currently it gives +75, but doesn’t appear to help with anything] (This was brought up in a forum thread)
This is currently not doing much. However, we are planning to fix this in the the 4/26 hotfix. It will be updated to sometimes net extra fish. Not 100%, but a decent percentage. It will also increase your chances by a significant margin of fishing up Stan’s Tacklebox or Lure recipes if you have not yet fished those up!

Patron [also] increases chances to fish up Stan’s Tacklebox and Lure recipes. The box and lure are set up using the “Marvelous Luck” rules that lockbox mounts use. (Marvelous Luck being a patron benefit)

Is it possible to fish [the recipes and tacklebox] up from the lava in ashenfell while working on those scoria fish?
Yes

April 13th Live Stream

Are the [Tenebrean] engines for [irotp] upgrades placeholders?
No, you’ll use engines for upgrades

Any chance we can make [Tenebrean Engines] purchasable with the fragments from td/irotp? “Token rewards”
Maybe?

Will each boss in rotp drop [Tenebrean Engines] or just last boss since its original loot and lockout?
Short answer: all of them.

Should we expect a or any 20man raids in rift to come?
We are focusing on 10 man content at this time.

Will the currency be etheral shards for irotp or will there be a new one?
Short answer, it uses the same currency as tartaric depths. you’ll just get more of it from boss kills in irotp and the rotp gear on the store will cost more.

Isn’t there a way to make raids like rift. boss would be powered by the amount of people that attend. if 3 want to try. go for it, if 20 want to go.
Yes, there is a way. however, that’s not an easy task to do well. (for example, mechanics don’t always scale well

[What is the hit requirement for iRotP?]
It [has a] 2200 hit requirement

Will iRotP dps requirements be tuned around eternals that are upgraded as much as possible?
We will take that into account.

[Will there be a new reward for the iRotP conqueror achievement?]
There is a new reward for the conq. It’s a surprise! but it is super cute. (Ghar Station Speculation: a newly datamined Phoenix Budgie!)

[What is the target audience for iRotP?]
We are targeting the 75th percentile. not the 99th.

Dimensions Updates!

The following is intended to detail the patch note “Premium Dimension Stashes from Minions have had the loot breakdown tweaked a bit to improve the item variety in higher tier stashes.”

[We are] going to make a small change to dim caches for this week’s patch. For the bonus building blocks in 4/8h caches, [we are] going to just include a building block stash instead of loose blocks. That way, the bonus blocks can just accumulate a separate stack of sub-caches rather than be intermixed with the non-block items and quickly filling bags.

Which put the strange place of if wanting more of the universally useful things in the lower rarities harder to get.

What [we are] looking at to change that up…
Green: 4 items skewed uncommon and rare rarities
Blue: all above PLUS one more item skewed heavily rare
Purple: all above PLUS one more item skewed heavily epic
Orange: all above PLUS one more item skewed heavily epic or Relic+

Net result – Green stashes get one less potential item (4 instead of 4-5), Orange gets one more item (7 instead of 6). Each higher tier will not lose access to anything from a lower tier by rolling better, but loses the chance that everything in the stash will be higher rarity.

But given that the things most wanted in quantity are in the uncommon/rare tiers, that seems like a positive instead of negative. [We] think that should feel better, and should completely eliminate the question of “should I send a lesser minion on this mission and risk not getting any rewards at all?”, which is [an unfun] question to have to ask.

This SHOULD go live this week.

Between that and bundling of bonus building blocks so you can open the bonus blocks at a time and place of your choosing, the Premium Caches should feel much better after the next patch.

On Dimensions and Doors:

[We] have actually been pondering the doors more in the last couple of days in fact. Unfortunately, [there are] no [quick and easy] solutions that would allow [us] to scale them. [We] could release some doors now that would be fully interactive, but they would be locked at their set size in terms of scaling. Interactive in terms of being clickable to open and close. Or [We] could set them up to proximity open like the ones in Hammerknell IA.